City Road Podcast

COVID-19 is altering city experiences and spaces. As cities respond, the contours of post-pandemic cities are also being altered, for better or worse. This podcast brings together a group of leading Sydney-based urbanists to start a conversation about what cities will look like post-COVID, and how pathways towards a just urban recovery might be fostered. “We’ve been thinking about the imperative f...

Welcome to City Road's 50th episode! To celebrate we've invited the very first guest of the show, Professor Nicole Gurran, back to talk about how we started City Road, our first episode on Airbnb and Cities, and Nicole's current work on Informal Housing.    We also talk about some fun facts about City Road and the broader work that is coming out of the Urban Housing Lab at the University of Sydney...

Who owns London? In recent decades, London has fallen into the hands of the super-rich. It is today the essential “World City” for High-Net-Worth Individuals and Ultra-High-Net-Worth Individuals. Compared to New York or Tokyo, the two cities that bear the closest comparison, it has the largest number of wealthy people per head of population. Taken as a whole, London is the epicentre of the world’s...

Doomsday peppers consider the COVID-19 pandemic a 'mid-level' event that they are well-prepared for. We're talking with Bradley Garrett about Doomsday peppers, underground bunkers and COVID-19. Doomsday prepping is the practice of anticipating and adapting to an imagined impending crisis, ranging from low level crises to extinction-level events "The inability to know which disaster is being prepar...

In this episode we use Eugene McCann's four dialectical tensions to understand the COVID-19 city: i) invisibility and visibility; ii) privilege and privation; iii) selfishness and solidarity; and iv) absence and presence. What’s the role of ‘academic experts’ in the debate about COVID-19 and cites, and how can we separate our expert role from our personal experience of being locked down in our cit...

Singapore is air-conditioning the inside and outside of buildings. This is about comfort and convenience, but it might also be about human survival. In this talk with Dallas Rogers, Professor Simon Marvin outlines the scope and potential importance of a new agenda around urban climate control and urban weather modification, which he calls the 'new thermal fix' for our cities. “And the challenge is...

In this episode we talk to Matthew Mindrup about his new book, which provides an intriguing narrative about the practical and cultural factors motivating the development of the architectural model’s different uses. "Painters make paintings, poets make poetry and musicians make music, but architects do not make architecture." Dr Matthew Mindrup The attractiveness of the architectural model, he argu...

How do urban planners regulate the sex industries in our cities? The sex industries - from sex work to porn production - are often perceived and therefore regulated as unsuitable businesses for the high streets and residential neighbourhoods of cities. We talk with Associate Professor Paul Maginn about the role the planning system plays in regulating urban sex-scapes, the conservative morality of...

What can urban alliances and community organising teach us about building political unity across difference in cities? The 'progressive dilemma' is an apparent problem for contemporary left politics and our two guests have very different takes on the issue, and how it relates to urban politics. Our first guest is professor of politics from the UK and the other is a community organiser from Sydney....

Contemporary global circuits of policy advice are abuzz with 'urban solutions' from a growing industry of 'thought leaders'. These urban experts talk about 'policy solutions' and 'best practice models' and they have a ready supply of policy success stories from around the world. "What I'm really trying to study is this global circuitry of knowledge, a global network, and I'm engaging with cities n...

What makes up a nation? In the 21st century, nationalist frames are giving way to new interpretations of the global. Dr Jennifer Ferng speaks with Professor Vikram Prakash and Professor Julie Willis about the Encyclopedia of Australian architecture, national identity, and the obstacles to capturing selected moments of history. Prakash and Willis speak about the tensions between the national and th...

Is modern architecture actually energy efficient? Buildings like the Bauhaus Dessau designed by Walter Gropius required large amounts of heating in the 1920s. The preservation of modern buildings like these often require large amounts of energy consumption, which places them at odds with contemporary ideas around energy efficiency. "We have been conditioned as humans to a certain type of lifestyle...

Universities are grappling with creating an inclusive and global curriculum that will serve the needs of 21st century architecture students. In terms of architecture, which theories and buildings from which countries and cities should be included, and what are academics doing to address the histories of Indigenous peoples? "The reason I'm here is only because I basically dedicated 40 years of tryi...

Around the world cities are running out of drinking water. Yes, literally running out of water! Cape Town is a well-publicised example. But recently Chennai, and before that São Paulo, all faced the possibility of water not coming out of the taps. So what do cities do to respond to this crisis? How is the crisis materialised differently across cities? For whom is there a water crisis? “For me, it’...

The financial industry has an image problem; capitalism functions by creating both wealth and poverty. But for financiers, the problem of poverty might just be reimagined as an investment opportunity. "I'm looking at how - the way that finance works in cities is to create a lot of inequalities [and this] is starting to be incorporated back into finance; as people who are in control of capital are...

Episode 1 of the Country and Cities Series This a truth telling, of sorts, about how urban planning and built environment professions are implicated in the settler colonial process, with Libby Porter and Naama Blatman-Thomas "[Settler colonialism is] a structure of governance and control where white people - European people - arrive to a new territory, a new area, and create a new political entity...

"... the terrain of struggle for justice is happening in the city and in the countryside, and it's beginning to link." Eric Holt-Giménez In response to the social inequities and ecological damage wrought by the industrial and globalising food system, a growing food movement that champions food and farm justice, sovereignty and democracy is driving social, economic and political change across the g...

A gender sensitivity urban design process considers the political, cultural and economic factors that produce gender-based exclusion and discrimination in our cities. We're talking with Associate Professor Nicole Kalms from the Department of Design at Monash University. Nicole is the founding Director of the XYX Lab, a research group looking at the intersection of Space, Gender and Communication....

We’re travelling up the east coast of Australia with two early career researchers to talk about families and cities. Our first stop is Wollongong, about 70 kilometres south of Sydney with Dr Susannah Clement. Our second stop is Brisbane, about 900 kilometres north of Sydney with Dr Kate Raynor. Susannah has been tagging on with mothers and their children as they walk along the streets of Wollongon...

You've probably heard about residential mortgage-backed securities and the global financial crisis. But did you know corporate mortgage-backed securities were reshaping American cities at the same time? During the Great Recession, the housing bubble took much of the blame for bringing the American economy to its knees, but commercial real estate also experienced its own boom-and-bust. "... somebod...

What’s at stake in podcasting the urban? There might be more to this question than you think. Podcasting the Urban is a five-part series where we turn the academic gaze back onto our podcasting practice. We are playing the first episode in the series in the City Road feed. For more details see: https://cityroadpod.org/2018/12/19/podcasting-the-urban-five-part-series/ In 2018 City Road organised fo...

Education is one of the key civil rights struggles of our era, and urban schools need to do more to bridge the 'civic empowerment gaps' between students. How and what we teach children will determine how they engage in civic life for the rest of their life. It's time to rethink the role of civic education in our cities. This goes way beyond tweaking the curriculum. It means upending the curriculum...

In the early 1990s, when China’s artists were less able to participate in open debate about the shape of Chinese society, they turned to the production of urban space instead. “If you want to see the political impact of Chinese artists, we can look to the city in order to see that.” Dr Christen Cornell After the 1989 protests at Tiananmen Square, Chinese cities entered a period of radical social a...

PART II - How much public land has been stolen from the British people? The short answer is, a lot! We’re talking to Professor Brett Christophers from Uppsala University about his new book, The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain. And it’s a story that we just couldn’t squeeze into one episode, so alas, we’ve given the next two episodes of City Road over to explor...

PART I - How much public land has been stolen from the British people? The short answer is, a lot! We’re talking to Professor Brett Christophers from Uppsala University about his new book, The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain. And it’s a story that we just couldn’t squeeze into one episode, so alas, we’ve given the next two episodes of City Road over to explori...